Memory is what makes people as
people. It connects the past with the present and assures continuation of the present. It is the cherishing of the
valuable and a battle against anonymity and temporariness, the sign of life and
love, challenge to death and the tyranny
of power. Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel
laureate writes “if there is any substitute for love, it’s memory. To memorize,
then, is to restore intimacy”(150).
Anita
Desai is a novelist who has explored the themes of loneliness, East-West
conflict, the ennui of the middle class women and the nostalgia for the past
in her novels such as Fire on the
Mountain, Fasting-feasting, Where shall we go this Summer? and In Custody. Her fiction deeply probes the social and psychological world and
human condition. The readers can identify themselves with her characters, their
conflicts, their failures and successes and appreciate wisdom
gained by them through the
reconciliation between the ideal and reality. This article dwells
on how a person’s memory shapes and
reshapes one’s perception or experience of oneself , one’s family and place and
identity swirling in the whirlpool of
cultural change in Anita Desai’s novel, In Custody. Narinder K.Sharma notes that the novel
“offers a subtle transcendence of existence which is symbolic of a
convergence of all contradictory pulls which split the protagonist apart
throughout the narrative..” (8)
Amina Yaqin refers to
Desai’s elegiac farewell to a lost tradition. Her
symbolism is tinged with the tropes of a communally charged present, unable to
breakout of the fragmentary Hindu-Hindi and Muslim-Urdu divide despite her
staging the debates within the “secular” Indian-English novel (139).
In Anita Desai’s In
custody we find Deven,
a Hindi lecturer’s attempt to rescue himself and a Urdu
poet Nur from obscurity. Deven aspiring
for a life of significance and fame has been asked by his friend
Murad to interview the aged poet Nur for
his magazine.
The novelist also describes
the lack of historical interest of the townspeople. “The
temples were more numerous but had no history at all. There was not a literally
not a man in Mirpore who could have told when they were built or by whom’ (13).
None knew about the age of the banyan trees or its legends or their
history. “The fact was that no one knew the difference” (14). Was it due
to the historical indifference of the townspeople or their economic
deprivation?
There were ‘Hindu area’ and ‘Muslim area’ whose
division was unwritten and people observed restraint usually. Once a year
when Muharrum and The Holi festival came on the same day, there used to be
bloody clashes, the police bandobust,
the mutual threats and editorials on secularism in newspapers. After a few days,
the cautious and peaceful co-existence among the communities was
restored.
.
Memory of
Language and Language of memory:
When Deven refers
to the Urdu poetry, the poet Nur questions that there could
be no Urdu poetry when there was no Urdu language left and
the defeat of the Mughals by the British and the latter by the Hindiwallahs
turned Urdu into a corpse waiting to be buried. Amina Yaqin writes that
Desai’s fiction
demystifies the idea
of a national collectivity and looks towards the arts and the way of life of
individuals as distinctive cultural representations. Her constructions of
cultural memory are marked by the nostalgia for the past, and a kind of
closeness to the Romantic tradition with its “idealizing of “folk”, of vital
subcultures buried deep within its own society”(122).
When the poet shows
coldness towards him, Deven’s recital of Nur’s poems acts as
a thaw. His robust memory carries him on and he could almost feel the
smoothness of his father’s reed pens which he played with while he
listened, and smell the somewhat musty, but human and comforting odour of his
father’s black cotton coat. A tender almost feminine lilt enters his
voice with those memories and the poet listens to him engrossed. When the poet
Nur is lying on the
ground vomiting and being chided by his wife, Deven goes
there. Nur’s wife taunts
him for being his fan and
asks him to clean up the room, Deven picks up the papers and after
throwing them in gutter runs away from that place.
When Deven again meets his hero the poet Nur, he finds him
in wretched condition breathing fire over the degraded status of Urdu
vis-à-vis Hindi. Surrounded by the common people and scolded by his wife
, Nur presents a pathetic picture. Two
moments have remained intact in Deven’s selective memory. One has been the moment when he was listening to the
voices inside the house standing above the well of the courtyard and another
is his fleeing from of the house after
dropping the papers in the gutter. At times he recollects the completely different scene of “how he had
marched in and thrust away the vengeful figure of a white and silver witch ,
how he had raised Nur in his arms and seen to his ills and rescued him from
them…” (63) but this fantasy of rescuing poet in distress fades
away and the stark truth of the abandonment of poet by him remains.
He receives a
letter from Nur about his dying pigeons and for his help in
meeting expenditure to send him on pilgrimage to Mecca. In another letter
received by Deven, Nur’s second wife recounts her sufferings,
humiliations , how her talent has got Nur’s appreciation, her
intellectual companionship to Nur , the unwillingness of males such
as Deven to recognize and praise her superiority and she even challenges Deven
to read her poetry to judge for himself. Deven hasn’t had time, courage
and inner resources to accept her challenge and throws away her poetry.
Deven makes a lot of
efforts to get Nur’s poetry recorded in his voice. He has had to placate the various demands of Nur’s
first wife to have recording done in relative peace but fails, thanks to uncongenial setting which
included poet’s followers and an incompetent assistant Chiku. Later Murad
who originally asked him to interact with Nur pays nothing for his article and even
asks for sole rights over the cassette to enable Deven pay his bills for room
rented for recording. Deven feels that he has exchanged his mundane
life for perturbed predicament. He hasn’t been able to publish his poems
or monograph, avoid disappointment of his wife and son, get
recognition from his colleagues or students , evade the inheritance
of ineffectuality, his sense of vacuum,
the half-hearted help of Siddiqi . He has been forced to seek the help of his
students to make recording suitable and to face their demand for more marks in
the annual exam. When Jayadev , his colleague says that they should have taken
up some science subject or microbiology or computer technology for the
better prospects, Deven leaves him referring to their hopeless past and
unpromising future. Here the novelist Anita Desai can be appreciated in
envisaging the decline of humanities and languages in the present days of
commercialization.
In Desai’s In Custody, When Deven
returns home from Delhi , he finds his
wife Sarla in sulking mood. Both of have
been aware of mutual defeat
of their aspirations and their being victims leading to alienation
and Sarla remains gloomy without any means of consolation of poetry unlike Deven.
The latter asks the boy
Manu about his text and while going through
illustrations, he wonders at an image out of various memories
Pictures of a thin ,
vividly painted face taut and dragged out of proportion with disgust and rage;
of a twisted figure bent in pain on the floor-and upon these pictures a
third one, older and more faded and yet fraught with pain, a picture of
his father ,emaciated with illness, shriveled upon a pallet on the floor,
holding a tattered copy of poems in his hands and reading from them with an
expression of ineffable joy…. (73)
When Deven has
listened to the song on parrot rendered by his son, he remembers how his father
might have taught him, his suffering from asthma and disappointments in life
and his father being apologetic to his wife and sees similarity between
his position and his father’s leading to sympathy for the first time for the dead father.
Dawn of wisdom
Deven’s undertaking of custody of Nur’s poetry means
the reclamation of genius from being
mere history and a challenge to the market forces which give priority to only
‘useful’ disciplines and degrade other subjects. Deven’s memory of his school
days that has endeared him to Nur in the first place when of His attempts
to face the mundane world shows that he has left his provincial
mind in favour of a larger cause of a dying language, poetry and truth.
He hasn’t attained certainty of triumph but nor has he been content to
remain as the defeated. He has also been able to enlist the support of
the worldly wise Siddiqi, the lone Urdu teacher who appears like a guardian
angel to save naïve Deven and vanishing Urdu. A critic Chaudhuri compares
Deven with Sisyphus and writes “driven
by the urge of identity, Deven gets himself entrapped only to the realization
that isolation leads to complete freedom, driving oneself to creation, a heroic
attempt of survival in face of all losses”(136).
Though
Deven appears as a victim of his own psychological inadequacies inherited
as well as the real causes of his predicament are the commercial educational system, college administration,
the undermining of humanities, the gap between the urban Delhi and the rural
town Mirpur , the technological changes undermining the status of a typical language lecturer in
a small town
Works Cited
Brodsky, Joseph. Less
Than One: Selected Essays. New York, Penguins,1986.
Chaudhury, Anwesha
Roy. “Anita Desai ‘In Custody’ in maze of Existentialism.”
International Journal of English
and Literature, Vol. 4(9), pp .
435-439.Web.
19
Nov.2013.
Desai, Anita. In
Custody. New Delhi: Random House India,2007. Print.
Sharma, Narinder K "Duality of Illusion and
Reality in Desai's In Custody." Comparative
Literature and Culture 14.2 (2012).
Web.19 Nov.2013.http://dx.doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1962.
Sharma, B.S. “Remnants of Urdu Poetic Culture and Politics of
Language in Anita Desai’s In
Custody.”Rev.
Journal of English literature 3.8: 181-197. Web. 19 Nov.2013.
http://www.academicjournals.org/IJEL.
Yaqin, Amina. “The Communalization and Disintegration of Urdu in Anita Desai’s
In
Custody.” The Annual of Urdu Studies.19:
120-141.Web.19 Nov.2013.
Other works
Consulted
Vijayalaksmi, M.“Ecofeminism in the Novels of Anita Desai.” Contemporary Discourse 4.2
(2013)
:51-54.Print.
Mohan Rao, H.S. “Anita Desai’s Bomgartner’s Bombay: A
Depiction of Desolated Diasporic
Life.” Contemporary Discourse 4.2 (2013) :55-58.Print.
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